Paul Janssen Lecture

The Paul Janssen Lecture has been a regular feature of the academic calendar at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience for nearly 20 years.

Lecturers are chosen on the basis of their global eminence in the field of neuroscience with a focus on schizophrenia. The annual lecture is named in honour of Belgian pharmacologist Paul Janssen (1926–2003) noted for discovering various drugs important to psychiatry, such as haloperidol, and who founded Janssen – the pharmaceutical company which sponsors the event.

This is a free event. Places are allocated on a first come first served basis and booking is essential.

Professor Nikolaos Koutsouleris is the Coordinator of the EU-FP7 funded project PRONIA ('Personalised Prognostic Tools for Early Psychosis Management'). He serves as consultant and Head of the Centre for Adolecent Psychiatry and Transitional Youth Mental Health and the Section for Neurodiagnostic Applications in Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich (LMU). Dr. Koutsouleris studied medicine at LMU between 1996 and 2003 as scholar of the German National Academic Foundation. He took his first medical & academic appointment in 2004 at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, where he finished his doctorate thesis in 2005. Since 2008, Prof Koutsouleris has advanced the use of multivariate pattern recognition methods for the identification and validation of diagnostic and prognostic prediction models in at-risk and early stages of affective and non-affective psychoses. His work was awarded with several national and international prizes and led so far to over 80 peer-reviewed, highly cited papers. In addition, he strived to make robust machine-learning methods available to researchers in the clinical neurosciences in order to improve the methodological rigour of this new research direction based on the proper use of validation and model sharing approaches. These efforts have the lead to the publication of the open-source NeuroMiner machine learning platform.

Jonathan is Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Exeter Medical School and also heads the Psychiatric Epigenetics group at the IoPPN, King's College London. He graduated with a degree in Human Sciences from Oxford University, where he took a particular interest in cannibalism, before undertaking his PhD in psychiatric genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry. After spending three years as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, he returned to the Institute of Psychiatry to establish the Psychiatric Epigenetics group in the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre. He was appointed as Professor of Epigenetics at UEMS in September 2012.

The research in Jonathan's group focuses primarily on the role of epigenetic processes in mediating the interplay between genes and the environment in common, complex disease phenotypes. Although their work is particularly focussed on neuropsychiatric phenotypes, their research spans the spectrum of biomedical disease phenotypes. Additional information can be found at the Complex Disease Epigenetics Group website.

Jonathan's group takes an integrated genetic-epigenetic approach to complex disease phenotypes, and has considerable experience in high-throughput epigenomic profiling. The recently took the lead on the first systematic genome-wide scan for DNA methylation changes associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and are currently funded to perform methylomic studies of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, alcoholism, and Alzheimer’s disorder. Their research aims to understand the role of functional epigenetic variation in mediating the interplay between genes and the environment in disease.

Thursday 25th January 2018 at 18:00 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"Trajectories of brain change in psychosis: ‘risk’ or ‘resilience’?"

Speaker: Professor Christos Pantelis

Chair: Professor Anthony David

Vote of Thanks: Professor Ian Everall

Professor Christos Pantelis Biography

Professor Christos Pantelis is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow, Foundation Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Scientific Director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at The University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health. He holds an Honorary Professorial Fellow position at the Florey Institute for Neuroscience & Mental Health and heads the Adult Mental Health Rehabilitation Unit at Sunshine Hospital. He is an Honorary Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Neural Engineering (CfNE), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University of Melbourne.

He leads a team of over 60 clinical and research scientists and students that have been undertaking neuroimaging and neuropsychological work in schizophrenia and psychosis, and other psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders since 1993 in Australia. His work has focused on brain structural and functional changes during the transition to psychosis. His group was the first to describe progressive brain structural changes at psychosis onset, with a seminal paper published in The Lancet in 2003.

Professor Christos Pantelis has established a unique resource of over 5,000 multimodal brain scans in patients with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders, including longitudinal imaging. Recent work focuses on early developmental disorders, including children with schizotypal features and autism.

He was named in the Thomson Reuters list of "The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds" for 2014, 2015 and 2016, representing the top 1% of most highly cited scientists in his field. He is on the Editorial Boards of national and international journals, including Associate Editor for Psychological Medicine.

Wednesday 9th November 2016 at 18:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"Translating from animal models to human schizophrenia: insights into pathophysiology, treatment and prevention"

Speaker: Professor Anthony A. Grace

Chair: Professor Anthony David

Vote of Thanks: Professor Philip McGuire

Professor Anthony A. Grace Biography

Dr. Anthony A. Grace is a Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University School of Medicine with Dr. Benjamin S. Bunney and had postdoctoral training with Dr. Rodolfo Llinas in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Grace has been involved in translational research related to the dopamine system for over 30 years. His early work pioneered the mode of action of antipsychotic drugs, and the identification and characterization of dopamine-containing neurons. His current work involves novel treatments for schizophrenia and its prevention, the role of dopamine in anhedonia and affective disorders, and the mode of action of ketamine and novel antidepressant drugs.

Thursday 5th November 2015 at 17:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"The Paradoxes of Dopamine Dysfunction in Schizophrenia"

Speaker: Professor Anissa Abi-Dargham

Chair: Professor Anthony David

Vote of Thanks: Dr Oliver Howes

Professor Anissa Abi-Dargham Biography

Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at CUMC, Columbia University, and New York State Psychiatric Institute. She directs the Division of Translational Imaging. Most of her career has focused on the development of tools to image neurochemical alterations in the brains of patients with schizophrenia and addictions. This research has resulted in findings describing the complex alterations of dopamine transmission in schizophrenia and their relationship to clinical symptoms, cognition and response to treatment, as well as their interrelatedness to glutamate dysfunction.

More recently she has expanded the work in her Division into multimodal imaging by building a multidisciplinary team with expertise in neurocomputational and neurocognitive disciplines. She has received funding from NIMH, NIDA and NIAAA, as well as NARSAD, Lilly, BMS, GSK, Forest, Pierre-Fabre. She has over 140 publications and is recognized internationally as an expert in the area of Imaging and Psychopharmacology.

She is Associate Editor for Neuropsychopharmacology, Deputy Editor for Biological Psychiatry, Past President of the Brain Imaging Council for SNM and President-Elect designate for ACNP.

16th Paul Janssen Lecture is available on King's College YouTube Channel:

Wednesday 10th December 2014 at 17:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"Schizophrenia genetics: settling the score"

Speaker: Professor Michael O’Donovan

Chair: Professor Anthony David

Vote of Thanks: Professor Sir Robin Murray

Professor Michael O'Donovan's Biography

Professor of Psychiatric Genetics Michael O’Donovan studied both Physiology and Medicine at Glasgow University, Psychiatry in Paisley (Scotland) and Cardiff (Wales) and genetics in Cardiff and Boston (USA).

Clinically, Michael specialises in diagnosis and management of schizophrenia and psychosis.

Michael has published over 300 scientific papers into molecular genetic studies of psychotic disorders, as well as a range of other disorders including ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease.

Michael leads a large international schizophrenia research consortium and is also the Academic Psychiatry Lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales.

John McGrath is a psychiatrist interested in discovering the causes of serious mental disorders. He is the Director of the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and conjoint Professor at the Queensland Brain Institute His research aims to generate and evaluate nongenetic risk factors for schizophrenia. He has forged productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology. For example, John and his colleagues have made discoveries linking prenatal vitamin D and later risk of mental illness in the offspring. In addition, John has supervised major systematic reviews of the epidemiology of schizophrenia. He was awarded a John Cade Fellowship by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. In 2016 he was also awarded a Neils Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation.

Wednesday 7th November 2012 at 17:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"Why can’t psychiatric genetics be more like neurology?"

Speaker: Professor John Hardy

Chair: Professor Tony David

Vote of Thanks: Professor Sir Robin Murray

Professor John Hardy Biography

John Hardy contributed to a critical breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. He has since led a broader effort to understand the genetic factors underlying several forms of degenerative brain disease, including Parkinson’s disease and motor neuron disease.

John discovered that a mutation in the gene for amyloid precursor protein (APP) caused deposits of a substance called amyloid to form in brain tissue, associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Deposits of amyloid, which kills brain cells, later proved to be a primary cause of the disease.

Single mutations in APP are rare, and John’s work now harnesses the power of whole-genome sequencing to reveal the more complex interactions between genes and the environment that increase the risk of neurodegenerative disease. John is the recipient of numerous awards, including the IPSEN, Allied Signal, Potamkin, MetLife and Dan David prizes, as well as the AAIC Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research, the Anne Marie Opprecht Prize, and the Pritzker Prize for Parkinson’s disease.

Professor Jonathan D. Cohen is an American psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University. He is also the founding co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He originally joined the faculty of Princeton in 1998 and became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior in 2000. A noted expert on neuroimaging, he played a major role in increasing the use of fMRI scanners in scientific research. He has been a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science since 2007 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2012. He is a recipient of the Joseph Zubin Memorial Fund Award, the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science's William James Fellow Award.

Wednesday 4th November 2009 at 17:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"The simple truth about the genetic complexity of schizophrenia"

Speaker: Professor Daniel Weinberger

Chair: Professor Tony David

Vote of Thanks: Professor Philip McGuire

Professor Daniel Weinberger Biography

Professor Daniel Weinberger is a professor of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and Director and CEO of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, which opened in 2011.

Wednesday 3rd October 2007 at 17:30 | Wolfson Lecture Theatre IoPPN Main Building

"What can genes tell us about the brain and schizophrenia"

Speaker: Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Chair: Professor Robin Murray

Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg Biography

Dr. Meyer-Lindenberg studied medicine at Bonn (Germany) and Cornell University and did residencies in psychiatry and psychotherapy in Giessen (Germany) and in neurology in Bonn. He received his M.D. in 1991 and his Ph.D. (Habilitation) in 1999. He is board certified in psychiatry, psychotherapy and neurology. He also holds a Master's degree in pure and applied mathematics from the University of Hagen (Germany).